Daniel Schaffer Awarded NSF Fellowship
By Adam Kohlhaas
Daniel Schaffer, a recent graduate of the undergraduate program in Computational Biology in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), was awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) fellowship as part of their Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP).
The NSF GRFP was established to acknowledge and provide assistance to exceptional graduate students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. These students are enrolled in research-based master's or doctoral programs at recognized institutions in the United States. It is the oldest fellowship program that directly supports graduate students in this field and has been awarded over 60,000 times since 1952.
Schaffer is interested in many topics in the field of comparative genomics, particularly in the evolution of traits and cellular systems that, in extreme forms, manifest as or influence human diseases. During his time at CMU, he worked on a method for studying the role of genomic regulatory elements in mammalian evolution, applied principally to the evolution of brain size.
For more information about the NSF GRFP, please visit their website.